Bank DnB NORD has headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It is quite interesting to see their web page. Here they are forced by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority to publish a serious reprimand in both Danish and English. Turns out they did not disclose information they were required by law to disclose in their annual report for 2009.

DnB NORD is owned by DnB NOR with headquarters in Norway. And it looks like DnB NOR also have problems with the local financial authorities. And last year DnB NOR accepted a fine and forfeiture of profits illegally obtained from insider trading.

This is the same as confiscating all of Googles servers because somebody used Google Docs for an illegal purpose. The police did not even try to contact the party before taking their servers. And they did not just take the server that might have been used for an illegal purpose, but all servers at the site.

The timing is interesting, as the DDoS attack that allegedly was planned on this public EtherPad installation took place months ago. And now - two days before election day in a federal state - they confiscate almost all their servers.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/20/german-pirate-partys-servers-confiscated-in-police-raid-two-days-before-election/

Please note that the election in Bremen are not just municipal elections in the city of Bremen. The election on Sunday is in the German federal state of Bremen. Before this happened the Pirate Party had a real chance of getting elected on Sunday. But now all of the infrastructure they used for the election has been confiscated. Member lists, task and event planning, election plans - all confiscated.

Child pornography and terrorism have been the major excuses for taking away civil rights the last few years. And they are useful excuses, as anybody trying to oppose a proposal made with such an excuse has to suffer guilt by association, even if completely unfair.

They do not have nukes, they have volcanoes.

When they triggered one of them last year, it caused a lot more disruption to European air traffic than 9/11 did to US air traffic. And they know how to use their volcanoes right: During the incident Reykjavik airport was one of the few airports in Europe still open.

I am pretty sure this was retaliation against the Brits abusing anti-terror legislation to freeze Icelandic assets.

If you do not understand satire, you should not have read this...

Copyright in Germany lasts until the end of the 80th year after the last of the authors (or composers or lyrics writers) died. In the last 100 years copyright duration in Germany has been extended about 100 years. All extensions have been retroactive.

It is quite interesting to compare this press release with the article exposing this. Technically GEMA is correct in their press release, but they do a lot of spin, and do not tell the entire story.

GEMA wrote to kindergartens, demanding:

1. Payment for any sheet music copied. Price per sheet is similar to the price of a song on iTunes.
2. Payment for any copying of lyrics. Same price per sheet.
3. Reporting of any song performed in the kindergarten, complete with title, name of composer, name of publishing company currently publishing the song in Germany, and the time the song was performed. No payment was demanded for this in the letter.

In the press release GEMA is backtracking on the bad publicity this gave them when the press took up the story and adding their own spin by saying the reporting about payment for song performances was wrong (which it was) and not mentioning that they still require all kindergartens to report all song performances. Also they do not mention that a requirement of reporting performances to GEMA almost always is a precursor for a demand of payment.

VG Musikedition is not an entity completely separate from GEMA. In fact they are so tightly connected and what they do is so similar that it is hard to explain why they are not the same organization. Unless when you think of the extra administration having two entities cause. When the two organizations both funnel some of the money through the other organization, they can both take a piece of the cake before distributing the rest to the artists. And this is probably the real reason why VG Musikedition asked GEMA to collect the money for them instead of doing it themselves, as they were supposed to.

IMHO a fine example of the difference between communism and fascism.

copyright violation != theft

Welcome to the physical world. If you do not like security and are afraid to be locked out of your own house, you are free to remove the lock on your front door.

There has not been much happening in Piratbyrån for the last few years anyway.

Many of the active people from Piratbyrån have become active in The Pirate Party or other clusters like Werebuild, The Julia Group or Telecomix. (The Telecomix Crypto Munitions Bureau held the conference recently discussed here where security flaws in some VPN tools used for filesharer anonymity were exposed.)

My guess it that the core people in Piratbyrån felt that this cluster was no longer needed and used the death of their friend as an excuse to shut it down, as a post-mortem honour to him.

In Swedish law, even evidence gathered illegally is permissive in court.

And with the new IPRED legislation in Sweden from last year, the anti-piracy now have better means of obtaining evidence for civil court cases (pay us, or we sue) than the Swedish police has for criminal file sharing cases.